Immediately following Deep Red, Italian director Dario Argento considered adapting a work by H.P. Lovecraft to the big screen. Instead of being constrained to another thinker’s ideas, Aregento opted to take the American gothic writer’s essence of unseen forces and place them alongside the theories of the unconscious as found in writings of Thomas De Quincey. What results is Suspiria, one of the most authentic presentations of a nightmare dream state ever set to screen.
When American ballet dancer Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives at the doors of the Tanzakademie, she is met by Patty Hingle (Eva Axén), a recently expelled student, who is fleeing from the premises while uttering broken phrases. Shortly thereafter, Patty is gruesomely murdered as a fellow dancer becomes an innocent bystander. As the dance academy attempts to regroup, Suzy becomes suspicious of not only the various instructors, but the institution as a whole before discovering it is a front for a more sinister collective: a witches’ coven.
Argento, a consummate stylist known for his giallo mysteries where the detective becomes personally involved with his investigation, borrows the ominous, unbridled, and omniscient presences in Lovecraft and combines them with the theories of one of the earliest and foremost commentators upon unconscious imagery, Thomas De Quincey. In Suspiria De Profundis–published nine years before the birth of Sigmund Freud–De Quincey examines how the mind takes abstract concepts and assigns concrete images to them. It is also in this work that Argento discovered his outline for his trilogy, which Suspiria serves as the opening chapter. The British writer states that, as there exists three Fates, three Graces, and three Muses, there is also an equal number of Sorrows: “Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears,” “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs,” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.”
How does Argento visually represent these complex notions to the screen? Wisely, he does not issue us the typical barrage of unconnected, oftentimes (meta)physically impossible cinematic dream visuals, implemented in order for the filmmaker to free him or herself from the bonds of plot feasibility. Instead, Argento creates a very tangible realm with very real, extremely plausible characters in equally believable locales. However, much like an actual dream (as opposed to a cinematically stylized one), the events which take place in Argento’s world deviate ever so slightly from reality, thereby giving them a truly haunting air. For example, maggots fall from the ceiling before we learn that a shipment of rotten fruit stored in the attic is the culprit of the anomaly. The capstone of the director’s vision in this respect is his fashioning a very naïve aggregation of characters, placed in the most unassuming of settings, the culmination of which is–in the director’s words, “an expressionistic fairy tale”–written by Franz Kafka while on LSD.
Suspiria is flooded with hard images, many of which intentionally, as well as unintentionally, form motifs: triangles are the predominate shape throughout as flowers, sleep, a preoccupation with money, blindness, water, and the color red fill the screen for the duration of the feature. In order to create and sustain a state of naturalistic ambiguity and imbalance akin to dreams themselves, only a handful of these themes are given the slightest logistic validation while many exist in order to sustain and heighten the suspense throughout while others merely exist in order to jar the continuum of the film.
Shortly after we enter the academy, we discover a large number of those within the studio’s walls house a preoccupation with money, only later to be granted the insight by Professor Milius (Rudolf Schündler) that “Their [the witches’] goal is to accumulate a great personal wealth.” As such, we are left to deduce that the dance school is a cover for the instructors (the witches) to allocate potential membership. This also legitimizes why the students, after the double murder at the offset of the film, were not relocated or, better yet, immediately sent home atop the fact that we never see one investigator after the initial reporting of the crime. Once this seeming plot ambiguity is resolved, our epiphany acts as a daunting, macabre revelation in that–those not fixated by the almighty dollar or, worse, have reason to believe that something is amiss–are doomed to suffer as we are left applauding Argento’s clever postponement of plot exposition in order to maintain tension through the majority of the film.
Yet the aforementioned motif is one of the few which is not juxtaposed, leading to a negation by which the viewer is left with little to help decipher Suzy’s predicament. In a rare instance in which we are permitted out of the academy, Daniel (Flavio Bucci), the school’s blind pianist, is found in a crowded pub immediately after being relieved of duty by the headmistress. The controlled, appeasing compositions which had, only moments before, emanated from the pianist’s fingers are countered by the cacophonous sounds of Schuhplattler dancing (as are the organic movements of the ballet students to the drunken undulations of the folk dancers). Yet, further compounding the dissonance, the following scene has Daniel, now isolated in a barren town square, lost amid a barrage of gray, stone architecture. In the only other instance which takes place outside of the school save for the opening, the hard symmetry of the academy and its décor is set against the rotund buildings which comprise the local university where, perhaps predictably, two scholars are at odds regarding the legitimacy of the occult.
To help achieve his harrowing psychological ends, Argento has his cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, mimic the color schemes found in Walt Disney cartoons as the triad of red, blue, green dominate throughout. Though the former is the preeminent hue of the feature–seen in the guise of entire rooms, fingernails, wine, and blood–the colors, often implemented monochromatically, appear together at the finale, to cunningly effective ends (in the form of a peacock nonetheless), hinting that the source of the film’s dilemma has been omnipresent since we first entered the school. Also in reference to color, the name of the administrator of the academy, Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) stands in staunch contrast to the purported source of Suzy’s difficulties, that is, the “Black Queen,” the head of the witches’ coven.
Lastly, Goblin’s score–with leitmotifs including piano and bells, dominating bass rhythms, and chants–is perhaps one of the most remarkable, masterful soundtracks of any film as it helps, helps mind you, direct the reader to some form of stability before it offsets our recently acquired equilibrium once more.
Much like David Lynch, another master of the cinematic nightmare, Dario Argento–by not issuing a torrent of illogical, unrelated symbols as does Salvador Dalí in his Un chien andalou–but rather a plausible scenario which is thereby riddled with feasible, yet offsetting, events–creates a true nightmare which few have been able to rival (Eraserhead was released the same year). Arguably, a little noticed facet of Suspiria serves as a metaphor for the whole: A brief segment appears in which wallpaper repeating an M.C. Escher print can be glimpsed in the background, patterns which are logistically impossible but nonetheless continue to persist right before our eyes.
-Egregious Gurnow
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